Chapter Text
Itachi doesn’t remember the first two years of his second life with any clarity.
It’s a peculiar phenomenon to the former-Uchiha, now-Black child. His sense of self-identity is rock-solid. He has known who he was from the moment he breathed his second first breath. This is not a mercy.
There are many ways a life can be tragic, but few are as comprehensively terrible as Uchiha Itachi’s. He lived a wretched life and died a suitably wretched death. This is where it should have ended.
It had not.
Kabuto drags his soul back, from death into ton-life; hammers it into an unnatural, un-living container. It hurt, he remembers. Most of his life can be viewed through different shades and flavours of pain, and his deaths were no different. Life—Death—Not-life—Not-death—
And then—Birth.
Terminal depression hits more or less instantly. There is nothing for Itachi here, in this ill-fitting world. The journey he had, the path that was his to walk has been walked, for better and for worse. He is finished. Whatever force had poured his soul into the shell of a newborn miscalculated badly. There is no Sasuke here, to anchor him. No Shisui to drive him. No Hound to guide him. There is just Itachi, without a single leash to keep him from his rightful death.
The beings that populate this new, worse world disagree. They keep his body alive with powers beyond his understanding. It takes some doing, and a bizarre investment of energy and focus but the mysterious beings succeed. They prune, sculpt and adjust; they prod and yank and change until the body can survive and sustain the complexity of his soul. Of his thoughts, to be more precise.
If he really is an infant, his birth givers possibly consider this to be a miracle. Itachi knows it to be a curse. He spent a decade suffering, with only the promise of death to look forward to. And yet—here he is; alive and theoretically functional.
***
Itachi can’t help but become vaguely aware of his—Parents? Soul-kidnappers? Unwitting wardens? Physically, they are indistinguishable from any other humanoid, in that Itachi’s baby eyes can’t distinguish them. The one characteristic he does make note of is how reserved they are. They could be hedging their bets, holding their hearts in check until the strange infant’s fate is clearer. Alternatively, they could be phenomenally cold people—not unlike some Uchiha he could name. Their reasons are, like all things, entirely immaterial. One way or another, aside from the medics, Itachi’s only caretaker is so overwhelmingly supernatural, that seeing them was almost enough to shock him out of his determined amble towards death.
The creature loves him with everything it is. They are also a slave of some kind—which is precisely none of Itachi’s business. They fuss over him endlessly and rasp various lullabies that he has no hope of understanding. Perhaps most importantly, they are the only being, human or otherwise, willing to hold Itachi’s strange little body. The creature rocks, pets and burps him. Their leathery limbs provide warmth, comfort and security—all those things his infant brain is wired to respond to.
It’s possible, Itachi admits, that he is their offspring. Itachi’s limbs feel smooth and appear pink, he could grow into bat ears and grey-brown skin. Should he survive past the day he is physically able to hold a blade, of course, which is unlikely.
In a sense, the strong vein of apathy dominating the depressive episode is why he still lives. He can’t muster up the energy to do what has to be done. His caretaker takes their duty of care seriously; they will intervene at the first sign of damage to his charge. If Itachi ever manages to scrounge up the willpower, he will have to take swift and decisive measures to ensure he stays dead.
Drifting is the only path forward, so he works on getting a handle on this new body. As weeks and months go by, he manages to slow down his heart rate and dim the world until only the eternal blackness of his mind is left. There is no space for despair, rage, fear and sorrow. There is nothing at all; the closest approximation of death his mind can build.
Regulus Black breathes his first two years into Itachi’s go at dying by sheer force of will. Or lack of will, depending on the viewpoint.
It changes—everything.